Her father put his hand over her ear and drew her close, pushing her to tip her head so he could kiss her crown. All her life, he’d shown his affection by kissing the top of her head. Since she’d grown too tall for him to do it when she stood straight, he’d pulled her over so he could reach that spot, always the same. One firm peck, with a smack of his lips, and he’d let her go.
“You’re a good girl, Debra,” he said in the way that was his, the words slow and thoughtful, rolling carefully over his tongue.
He let her go and walked out the back door.
Into fire.
Deb sucked in a breath to shout a warning, but no word would come out. She reached out to pull him back and caught hold of a firm, warm arm.
“Shh, hon. I got you.”
Her father’s arm hooked around her waist. But it wasn’t her father’s arm. It was too thick, too long, the skin too smooth, the hair too soft. Her eyes flew open, and pain slammed down on her all at once. Body, mind, and heart, all at once.
She tried to breathe and couldn’t make her body move enough to let the air from lungs full of unvoiced scream.
Simon lay beside her, facing her. “Shhh,” he breathed.
No word or sound or breath would leave her while pain goose-stepped through her. The pain of her body didn’t matter; it was only the surface on which the real agony stomped. Dad. Dad. Daddy. Oh, Daddy.
A macabre, malicious slideshow erupted in her mind: image after image after image, each one snapping into place just long enough to activate horror before another image supplanted it. Justin Walsh, stopping by to ask her out. The strange SUV she’d seen before. The guns. Justin falling dead. Running, running, running. Her father, cocking his shotgun. Her father. Daddy. Oh, Daddy. Fire. The room with the curved walls. The men. Leah. No one to save them.
Her father. They’d killed her father.
She couldn’t breathe.
“I got you, hon. It’s over.” Simon leaned closed and brushed his lips over hers.
As if she were Sleeping Beauty, the touch of his lips unlocked her pain-choked chest and she let out all that held air not in the scream it had meant to be but in a sob. “Daddy! Oh my God, Daddy!”
“Ah, baby,” Simon murmured and came all the way to her, tucking her head beneath his chin, closing her up completely against him. It hurt, every point at which he touched her, held her, caressed her, flared hot with pain, but she didn’t care. Finding her hands, she pushed them between their chests and twisted her fingers into his t-shirt. And she wept. Hard and long and without restraint, she cried.
Simon held her and said nothing. He let his presence and his comfort say what she needed to hear.
Eventually, pain and exhaustion closed the valve on her tears, but she didn’t move. Nor did he. But he finally spoke.
“I love you, Deb.”
“Everything’s gone. They killed my dad.” Of all the horrific things she’d experienced, all of the pain she was in, all of the fear she’d felt—still felt—nothing compared to that: they’d killed her father. Right in front of her.
“I’m sorry. I know that doesn’t mean shit.”
She knew the Bulls were at the root of it all. But she didn’t blame them. Even now, reeling with loss and hurt, she didn’t blame the Bulls. Certainly not Simon. She and her father would have been in the crosshairs whether Simon and she had gotten close or not. Max put them at risk.
She didn’t blame him, either. How could she, when he’d tried so hard to keep her and Leah safe? He was a Bull. They’d accepted that part of him long ago, knowing what it meant.
Thinking they’d known what it meant.
“Leah? Max?”
“They’re together. I don’t know how they are. Like us, I guess.” He leaned back just enough to look into her eyes. “I know you’re hurt. Can you tell me how? I mean…what did they do, Deb? Can you say?”
Her physical injuries, though painful, meant so little under the shadow of everything else. What had they done? Beaten them, terrorized them, bound them. Stripped them naked and bound them again. Taken video of them, lying on the concrete. Touched them for the camera, stroking and petting, no less repellent for the bizarre gentleness of their hands.
And then left them alone. For what had to have been hours.
Her body would heal. Her father would never be in her life again. The house that had held her family always, in all its iterations, would never hold her family again. Those wounds, how could they heal?
Her body didn’t matter. What had happened in that round room didn’t matter. What had happened before it—what those men had done first—was a full destruction of her life.
They’d done it not to hurt her, but to hurt her brother. The men in the room hadn’t spoken much, and very little to her, but she’d heard enough to know that it was the Bulls they’d wanted to hurt.
She and Leah had been nothing more than devices. Blunt objects to swing at Max and Simon. Oh God, the guilt must have been crushing her little brother. They could not have planned a better way to do him irreparable damage.
She shook her head. Simon wanted to know about the hurt that left marks he could see. She didn’t care about that. Everything else was so much worse than that.
He sighed and kissed her cheek, grazing an abrasion with his beard. “Tell me what you want, Deb, what you need. I’ll do anything.”
“I don’t know. I need everything. There’s nothing left.”
“There’s Max. And Leah. And me, if you still want me. I will give you everything I have, everything I can do.”
“I want it to stop. I need it to stop.”
“Us?” His eyes slid away, focused on her cheek, and he brought his hand up and with a feather’s touch, skimmed the same sore spot his beard had brushed. “If that’s what you want. I love you, but I understand.”
She didn’t want to lose what they’d been on the cusp of having. Especially now, when she had nothing else left. He was right—she had Max and Leah and him. She absolutely couldn’t lose them. “Not us. I want you. I need you. But everything that made this happen. Will it ever stop?”
He actually smiled. There wasn’t much happiness in it, but there was relief, and there was love. “It’s over, Deb. We finished it. The guys who hurt you, they’re all dead. The one in charge, he paid hard for everything he did. The war is over, and we won.”
She tucked her head to Simon’s chest and let tears have their way again.
~oOo~
“Deb. Wake up, hon.”
Deb opened her eyes and saw Simon, crouching beside the bed. He had the look of a man who hadn’t slept in a very long time. She, on the other hand, had done little else but sleep. The time she’d lost while bound in the round room continued to slip and slide; she couldn’t have said how long it had been since she’d had a home and a life.
“Your brother’s at the door. He wants to know if you’ll see him.”
That woke her completely, and she got her arms under her and sat up. Pain gouged at her side, and she couldn’t hold back a whiny groan, but she got up and let Simon help her prop up against the pressed-wood headboard.
“Here.” He shook out a couple of pills from an unlabeled prescription bottle. “It’s time for pain meds, anyway.
He picked up her hand and dropped two oval pills into her palm. As he twisted the cap off a bottle of water, Deb stared at the pills. They made her so drowsy. She was sleeping so much, losing so much time.
Time for what? To hurt? To mourn? She popped the pills and took the bottle of water.
“Can I let him in?” Simon asked. She hadn’t yet told him one way or another. She nodded and took another swallow of the water.
When Max came in, Simon stayed at the door. “I’m gonna give you some privacy. I won’t be far.”
She dug up a smile for him—it hurt her face. “Thank you.”
He blew her a kiss and closed the door.
Her little brother, the last of her family, stood in the middle of the room. If she hadn’t had the experience for her very self, she might have thought that he’d been kidnapped, beaten, and abased. He stood before her, slump-shouldered, staring at the carpet between his boots.
Deb set the bottle on the dresser beside the bed. “Max. It’s not your fault.”
His head came up, slowly, and revealed such abject sorrow and regret that Deb’s arms were outstretched, beckoning to him, without her meaning to do it. Her chest cramped with pain from her bruised, strained ribs, but she let him fall into her arms.
“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. Oh fuck, Deb. Fuck. Just fuck.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said again, stroking her hand over his hair.
“It is. How can you say it’s not?”
She said aloud the things she’d thought in the few spells of wakefulness she’d had. “You tried to make us safe. You tried to keep us away from it. You did everything you could. And we all knew about the club. We accepted it. We’re part of it.”
He knelt beside the bed and sobbed in her lap. Deb set aside her own pains and held him.
Comforting her broken brother, absolving him of his guilt, talking it out—it helped Deb. Even as the painkillers began to soften her edges slightly, she felt her mind sort out the horrors of the past…few days? And arrange them in a way that—didn’t make sense, there was no way to make sense of all this—that she could grapple with. Saying aloud that she didn’t blame Max, that it wasn’t his fault, made it true, as well. In a concrete sense, she believed it for the first time when she said it to him, when she saw his need and met it.
When he calmed and sat back on his heels, swiping angry hands across his wet cheeks, Deb asked, “How’s Leah?”
He laughed sadly. “Like you. Taking care of me, when I should be taking care of her.” His bleak gaze found her eyes. “She said she wasn’t…they didn’t…but she doesn’t remember everything, and I don’t understand. Why were you naked? What did they do?”
Knowing Max as she did, she understood that if she cut off that line of questioning, he’d fill his answers in himself, with the worst possible scenarios. “They didn’t—rape us, I mean. They stripped us down, and I thought they meant to. But a guy came in with a camera, and they just…they tied us together, back to back, and just…filmed us. The guy in charge, he”—remembering it, she felt disgust, and she shuddered. Max saw it and flinched hard—“he just…touched. Petted. For the camera. I think he did the same to Leah. I don’t know why.”
“Fuck me. I killed that cocksucker too fast.”
Her strongest sentiment regarding the deaths Max and Simon had brought about was relief.
“Fuck, Deb,” Max muttered. “Dad.”
She nodded because words were insufficient and impossible.
“It hurts so fucking bad. I can’t—they took everything.”
She gave her brother Simon’s answer. “They didn’t. They took a lot. But you and me, we’re still here. Leah’s with us. Simon, too. The Bulls.”
Another sad parody of a laugh. “They fucked the club up, too.”
“Simon told me.” Griffin and Dane dead. Griffin’s girlfriend, too. And Rad hurt. So many bodies strewn across two counties.
Max picked up her hand and held it between both of his. “If I’d’ve thought things would get like this, I never would have…”
“Stop, Max. There’s no point in saying something like that, or even thinking it. We’re here. This is it. We either die, or we live, but there’s no other world to do it in.”
“I love you, Deb. I never want you hurt.”
“I don’t want you hurt, either. I love you, too.” The smile she put on for him didn’t fit quite right, but it felt real enough. “Loser.”
His smile in return was true. “Skank.” He sighed and relaxed a little. “Jenny had her baby. Duncan Maxwell. Idiot named his kid after me. Mav’s bringing them back here this afternoon.”
It didn’t surprise her at all that Maverick would name his son after Max. She didn’t think he’d ever had another friend as close as Mav. Not since Martin.
But a new baby in the clubhouse? “Is the club still locked down? Simon said it was over.”
“It is. But we’re not taking any chances at all. Until we sit at a peace table, we’re keeping everybody together. They went after the people we didn’t bring in.” Pain racked his features again. “Fuck, Deb. I’m…”
“I know. I don’t blame you, but even if I did, you’d be forgiven. Don’t spin off and leave Leah and me, okay? Take our love and let yourself up.”
He sighed again, but managed a nod with it. “I’ll call Simon back up. He’s…I’m sorry about that, too. He’s been…okay. Good, I mean. With you. You’re good together.”
“Yeah, I know, asshole.”
Gunner laughed with something closer to humor. He stood and kissed her cheek.
~oOo~
“It was me that killed Griff.”
Deb opened her eyes. She lay on her back, propped on a couple of good pillows; the position gave her sore ribs some relief. Simon lay beside her, on his side, his hand on her belly.
She’d spent an hour or two downstairs, when Maverick and Jenny had come back with the baby. With the club steeped in so much death and pain, the bright spot of new life deserved a celebration. Such as it was. If not for Kelsey, Maverick and Jenny’s four-year-old daughter, there might not have been much warmth in little Duncan Maxwell’s welcome home.
But Kelsey didn’t understand about wars and death. She was only glad that her parents were back with her and that her brother had finally gotten out of her mommy. Her curious, enthusiastic chatter had eased a whole club full of tired hearts.
Leah and Max had come down as well, and Deb had felt real enjoyment, watching her brother hold the brand-new boy who bore his name. She’d seen a better light in his eyes, too. Not the frenetic fire of anger and chaos, or the slicing pain of guilt and loss. Pride, she’d seen. Affection. And more. Something like promise. Something good rising up from the dark ash.
She’d seen something like it in Leah’s eyes, too, as she’d watched him cuddle that tiny boy.
But once she’d been out amongst people, Deb found the spiky edges of her various kinds of pain. Her body had hurt more, and she’d felt jumpy and vulnerable, and just tired. As soon as she’d felt she could do it without causing too much concern, she’d asked Simon to help her up the stairs.
He’d put her to bed and stayed with her. They’d lain quietly now for quite a while. So his statement, made barely louder than a whisper, surprised her.
She turned her head to him. “What?”
He stared at his hand on her belly as he answered. “It was me. It was all so crazy. He was crazy. Patrice was dead, and he blamed the club, and Dane said something stupid. It all went to hell then.”
“Oh, babe.” She didn’t know what else to say.
“He didn’t mean to kill Dane. I know that. Everybody knows it. He just…he was crazy. But Rad tackled him and tried to calm him down, and I guess…I guess Griff saw Dane was down, and he panicked. He got Rad’s piece and shot him. He turned the gun on D, and I…he’d already shot Rad. I couldn’t…I just…fuck.”
It seemed clear to Deb—his guilt and his blamelessness, both. “You saved Delaney.”
“Yeah. That’s what they’re saying. Like I did something good.” He sat up and raked his hands through his hair. “But what if he wouldn’t have fired again? What if one more word would have calmed him down? What if I’d aimed for something other than a kill shot?”
“What if he’d would have pulled the trigger the next second? Imagining a world that can’t exist—I never understood why people do that. It didn’t happen that way. You made the call you made. Wishing the past away is a fool’s distraction.”
He dropped his hands and turned his head, eyeing her over his shoulder. The tenuous beginning of a grin lifted his cheek. “That’s the first thing you’ve said since I picked you up off that floor that sounds like you.”
She didn’t like the reminder of that place, but she brushed away the poke of revulsion. “And how’s that?”
“Direct. Strong. Like you’re going to be okay.”
“What other choice do I have?”
He picked up her hand and lifted it to his lips. “I’ll help you make your life good again. I promise. I love you.”
She couldn’t begin to imagine what even the next day would be, much less the next step of her life. But she had no choice but to live it. As when she’d comforted Max, talking out her feelings with Simon, easing his mind, eased her own as well.
She remembered what is was like to lose her mom and brother. She remembered the strange progress of her grief, the way it rolled and spiraled, hit peaks and valleys, and then backtracked to travel the same paths again and again before moving forward.
People talked about the ‘stages of grief’ like they were a one-way track everyone traveled in the same direction at the same speed. But Deb’s grief hadn’t been like that at all. So she knew that days of abject loss and crushing sorrow were coming. She knew she’d be angry. She might even blame Max and Simon and all the Bulls at times. She’d blame herself. And God. She’d rage at her father for facing an assault rifle with a shotgun.
But tonight, right now, as Simon sagged to his side and lay his head in her lap, as she combed her fingers through his hair and offered him some solace, as he held her legs and sighed as if he’d set the earth’s weight from his shoulders, Deb felt strong enough to get through what came next.